Studio Notes: "TOO MUCH" Defined

"TOO MUCH" of a good thing is too much.  I never thought I'd say that.  But the studio is in need of a good organizing, so I have started sorting (again).  As I cannot do much because of the constant cough and the sleepiness from the meds, it is a slow go.  But, four large—no, five large bags have gone out of the studio, and this is only a start.

Getting rid of things is only a beginning, however.  I need a new way of seeing.  My fabric cabinet has, for years, been a beautifully organized collection of shelves (the cabinet used to be a medicine cabinet in a hospital, built of oak, with narrow upper shelves and a base of deep proportions with a zinc mixing shelf).  It has been so beautifully organized, in fact, that I scarcely see it any more—it doesn't excite my imagination the way the rows of folded fabrics did in the beginning.  So all the fabrics came down for a good look-through.  I found fabrics there that I had used in the 70s and 80s when I first began quilting.  Dated?  Some are probably worth big bucks, now (*smile*)!  Especially the scraps from the clothes Mother made for us and herself when we were children.  Some really screaming "Mod" prints.

And there are the country flowers and hearts.  Small prints, the sort of thing to make doll's clothes from.  Might come in handy later on . . . but if I said this the first time, I would open the door to the merest shuffling things around, getting rid of nothing.

I meant for all of this to go to Good Will, but Jill said that Good Will did not really need our scraps, nor did they treasure little pieces of fabulous fabric the way we did.  Obviously, Jill is not the person to encourage me to continue with my clean-out.

But I know of someone who is giving her little daughter a sewing machine for Christmas, and having a couple of bags of fabric to practice cutting out and sewing and trying out all the stitches— that could be a really fun thing for a child!

Meanwhile, I kept two small boxes of bits and pieces, as I never use very large pieces of anything.  Only two boxes!  In a pile on the floor are things for projects— curtains for the studio, covers for the ironing boards and presser, some old clothes for Bethy to play dress-up in (REALLY old, some of these) . . .

My embroidery thread needed to be out where I could see it better.  So, I dragged drawers of it into the light and spilled it into a huge  wooden bowl.  Now I don't have to stop and open drawers and work with my color-organized bobbins to find a thread.  I can engage in the most soothing of occupations:  just fingering the bowl of beautiful threads and stitching.  No point to this stitching, no design, simply the in and out of the needle in the fabric, watching the line of stitch develop across the linen.  It can be good stitching, or it can be bad.  There is no standard here.  I stitch for the sheer love of the stitches.  When I'm done, I feel better, I can toss the stitching away or I can keep it (mostly it is tossed), and I move on to the next thing on my list.  I liken this to visiting a Day Spa for a short pick-me-up, but without having to dress and leave the house.

Then on to the fabrics or the "Surprise!" bags that have been hiding in corners, some for very, very long times.  An examination of the contents, some soulful delineation of the useful and the never-to-be-used-again, and, voiles!  A teeny-weeny bit more space!

Doing this not-so-difficult job makes me feel better.  If I was in the house sleeping on the sofa or whining in my chair by the fireplace, I would not accomplish anything but I would continue to think about all the things I was not getting done.  It is that horrible Puritan Work Ethic that spoils everything—even a nice opportunity for a lie-in on a rainy day.

The Pink Scarf

Color can set my fingers to flying and my mind to reeling!  Fingers and mind were both fully engaged this morning as I worked in a delirium of excitement to make this scarf for Bethy (Christmas).

It is so hard to explain how color affects me.  I realized, when I was in my 20s, that I hear music in colors (or see colors when I hear music), and decades later found the word for it:  Synesthete.  When I am working in the studio with music playing, I sometimes turn it off so I can lay out my colors for a project.  In the silence, I can "hear" the colors better.  Once I'm satisfied with the lay-out, I can go back to whatever music I was listening to.  Hard to explain.

I got up at four a.m. this morning and thought about the colors I would use for this project, then went into the studio (the short walk in the wet dark was a quick wake-up!) and got started on it.  I listened to the news (NPR) while I worked— occasionally the musical interludes would interfere, but the "mute" button solved that problem.  By half-past eleven I had finished the scarf, and was giddy with the results.  Beads, two dozen differently textured and colored yarns, and the simple single crochet stitch— what a great way to start the morning!

Why isn't it possible to make a living with baizillions of tints and hues of thread and a hook?   Oh, right— the economic bottom line. . .

Small piece: Sleet

The soft greys of these scraps were too appealing to pass over in my box of Little Bits And Pieces (not to be confused with the box of Medium-Sized Big Bits or the baskets of Bigger Bits).  The day was grey, and except for the fact that the temperature was in the 60sF, the sky could have been a sleety one.  The Atlanta area has not seen a serious cold snap yet, so I have imagined it.

I would hate to think that I have given up figurative embroidery, but these little quilts are so much fun— all small size, so the challenge is to design with clear shapes and to-the-point stitches so that the piece doesn't get too cluttered and turn into a muddle of thread and cloth in need of a good sorting.

This work joins others in my small basket of experimental pieces from the past six or eight months.  The pieces are a group of friends, each of which has its own story to tell.  It is the story of a person or an object that can be as interesting as the person or object itself, don't you think?  And the longer you know someone/something, the more interesting the story becomes.

A Return to Alphabets: G as in . . .

Back to the embroidered alphabet, after a long interlude of silence.  I couldn't find my "G" from my stack of alphas, and I let it bring the Alphabet Project to a halt.  So, just imagine it is here.  I'll post it one day.  Or make a new one.  Life is never a straight line . . . except in Grids, maybe . . .

Grids.  Dividing a space into sections (not necessarily equal-sized) can organize a space with remarkable ease and add a great deal of clarity to the grouping.  Precisely measured divisions can still be fun, though.  Grids are satisfying ways to present ideas.  Some examples I've pulled from studio storage boxes are:

Blue Grid.  How many different ways can you fill a square (or, a roughly square shape)?  Inspired by the Beaney and Littlejohn Stitch Magic, I used color to tie together an assortment of fillings for squares in a roughly 1 1/4" format:

Green Grid.  The grid is machine embellished wool, and the fillings are all whimsical.  This was part of a Freestyle Challenge from Cynthia on developing grids:

This grid is a response to a Freestyle challenge by Beth, and is a study in stitch and color set in this tight form:

Below is my blue "quilt."  It is a true mixed-media piece of gridwork, and was a delight to put together.  Many of the squares have hand-made paper as a background:

These last grids are photographs from a trip to Savannah.  Old cities have some of the most interesting photo ops.  The first is a sidewalk in front of one of the SCAD buildings, and the second is a collection of mirrors arranged on the walls of a little shop on a side street in the historic district:

Grasshoppers.  Really silly grasshoppers.  In fact, they only resemble grasshoppers if you squint a little bit and forget anything you may have learned in a biology class about insects.  I was playing with ideas while doodling one day.

Of other "G" words that come to mind, "gardens" pops up first.  Gardens and Flowers are (traditionally) the embroiderer's most cherished subject-- but my "F" post probably hammered that point home, so I'll give it a rest.

What I have learned about French Knots

Today, when I was squeezing yet one more long-stemmed French Knot into a smallish corner of a palm-sized piece, it occurred to me that I ought to write about knots before I forget everything I've learned!  This concern for my memory of both the important and the unimportant came about when it took me an entire day to remember the name of the very common Feather Stitch!  Celebrating birthdays is suddenly not such a celebratory moment.

I have learned that knots are tricky and unforgiving.  I get one chance at them, and if I garble the line of thread at any point, I don't have the opportunity to back out of the mess and start over.  My options are:  (a) cut it out c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y and start over; (b) sew another stitch (a bigger knot, or a satin stitch shape) on top of it in a fatter thread until the unfortunate knotted mess is completely covered up; or (c) come up with a creative appliqué.  Usually I opt for (a), though I can point out several cover-ups that actually changed the direction of the piece entirely!  I think my Muse is often impatient with me and resorts to tangling the threads I am using until I am forced to stop and listen to her.

Yes, another digression.

French Knots have no more personality than a dial tone when they stand by themselves, but in a cluster, or stretched across a space, they can have presence and even textural importance.  I love texture, so I am prone to wrap the needle many times, giving me a large, sometimes shaggy knot.  Jacqueline Enthoven, however, says a French Knot should be wrapped only one time around the needle.  If I want a larger knot, she continues, I should simply double the thread.  Or treble, it would follow.  So, the next thing I learned about French Knots is that when I double the thread and wrap the needle only once, the shape of the knot is tidy and it does not fall over to one side.  It is possible that the multiple-wraps leave the stitch exhausted under the weight of all those loops and they fall gasping to one side the way Victorian ladies took to their fainting couches.

French Knots have a habit of disappearing when I do not move my needle over just slightly as I enter the fabric from the right side to carry the thread to the back.  In fact, they simply pop right through the little hole they sit above and I'm left looking at the place where the knot was and wondering where my stitch has gone!

Most fortunately, French Knots play well with other stitches.  Stitches that make long, winding lines across the linen and leave open pockets in the process cry out for companionable French Knots to join them.   Look at the Herringbone stitch.  In other embroiderers' worlds, they are nicely even and controlled little children.  In my world, they run, leap, curl and change shapes as they cavort across the linen:

This rather chubby Cretan Stitch benefits from a French Knot in its house-shaped center:

Buttonhole stitches, particularly uneven ones, provide interesting "cubby holes" for the knots, and they almost look like cells as seen under a microscope when multiple rows are combined.  Square (or Open) Chain stitches read the same way:

Small, tightly-made knots may be cradled in the curve of Feather or Fly Stitch, or decorate the ends, like some of the more delicate weeds in my garden:

Here the knot has been used as a substitution for the terminating straight stitch normally found at one end of a Detached Chain stitch:

These slightly open Detached Chain stitches also use the knot as a tacking stitch:

Two lines of Buttonhole stitches have been "dotted" with French Knots in contrast colors:

In a pinch, French Knots can appliqué a shape to a ground fabric with delightful results,

and their high-texture makes for interesting filling stitches--tree foliage is well-represented in variegated thread here:

It is even possible to stitch small knots into larger ones.  These below are pale blue perle cotton #8 sewn into the darker perle cotton #3:

By adding a stem to the knot, the lowly French Knot becomes a tiny flower:

With the help of metallic thread, the knot can have loops added to it, as well (it is tension that makes this work, tension and the patience of Job):

The long-stemmed version can be turned into an edging or border by alternating the direction of the stem and knot, as in the pale blue row that slopes to the right,

and when clustered tightly together can give the appearance of small colonies of fungi or field flowers:

There are so many more ways to use French Knots-- and this is the simplest of all the knots.

I have also learned how lovely the complicated knots can be, but I believe that will wait for another day and another pot of tea.  Right now, I have a huge box of samplers spread across a table in the studio, and rather than putting them away, I want to go and sit with them and enjoy remembering the times I made them.  Stitched samplers can be ever so entertaining!